Late last week, several new patches for all stable versions of Ruby were released. These updates fix a FileUtils vulnerability which "allow[s] local users to delete arbitrary files and directories." It is suggested that everyone update their installs as soon as possible.

Milan Dobrota recently released the copyrb gem which allows you to copy and paste Ruby objects between terminal sessions in Mac OSX. This includes copying and pasting objects from your production servers into your local development environment.

Wealthfront Engineering posted a detailed article last week on the shortcomings of the Rails asset caching, as well as other issues you may see in a highly cached environment. They also detailed their bulletproof caching strategy, their code, and more.

John Vincent let us know about his new Ruby application registry application, called Noah. It's similar in concept to Apache ZooKeeper and provides you with a centralized service for maintaining server configuration information, naming, synchronization, group services, and routing information.

The Capybara team recently committed a first pass at a simple acceptance testing DSL which works inside of RSpec. It's similar in concept to Steak, providing you "feature," "background," and "scenario" keywords and it's super simple to setup. It's not yet in an official release and they're looking for feedback on the implementation.

Face.com is a web service which manages face detection and recognition. They had a recent API update and Roc Yu's new Face gem makes full use of it. The service can parse any photograph and return you the location and identity of known individuals within it.

The RubyGems 1.6 release will bring with it several updates, including a update gem activation that uses lazy loading and a more efficient use of memory. This activation update should fix the "already activated" issue that occasionally comes up with working outside of the warm embrace of Bundler.

Previous Episodes

Three blogs about Heroku deployment, Stepdown metrics gem for cucumber, Travis - the new distributed build system, An integrated firewall for Rails3, Using RMagic for fun and proit with Compass, and LumberJack in this edition of Ruby5